Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
by xXxVioletSkyxXx
Summary: Assorted scenes and free-verse from Harry Potter, the follow-up piece to Love, Me. Read and review!


It was a Tuesday night. It was the last day of October. It was the fourteen-year anniversary of your best-friend's death. Forget visiting the gravesite, you're shaking before you reach the door.

You step off your motorbike and feel the grey-slate rain. Smell it, taste it. Practically inhale it. Pull up your hood but keep your umbrella as a walking stick. You punch Muggle money into the machine opposite for a three hour stay and park the bike in the back-most spot under the spruce tree. You have three hours to reach the state of a drunken haze; you'll be back to your motorbike when you're far past incoherent. You'll be back when it's done.

You then cross the empty street with the empty hat-stand trees and fumble blindly for the door while the rain slides down your face. The houses shake in the wind. Cars streak away into the rain; the next swallows them whole.  
You walk through the door and cross the threshold- feel the courage in your fingers, feel your clothes soaked to the bone. You walk down the small dirty hall with a slouched authority, your head down, boots clunking dully on the wooden floor. The oil paintings frown down on you from the walls. The bar goes silent. The tattoos you bought with prison time burn into your skin; because you're a marked man, even here. Even in this little Bulgarian pub on the edge of town.

The two attractive women look up hopefully when you pass. But you have no time for that today. Today is the day to be alone.

"What'll it be?" he asks. Always the same tone, always the same smirk in his eyes, the same flap of greasy hair and a thick moustache from behind the counter. You sit down on your regular stool and pull out a pack of cigarettes from your leather jacket, lighting the tip with a match.

"Firewhiskey- straight up."

You watch him then, watch as he pulls the same half-empty bottle from beneath the counter, twist off the lid. You make the same joke about downing it in one. Your cigarette slouches on your lips and ash drips onto your collar. The barman is silent. The pub's patrons take to staring.  
The dingy glass is spun towards you, landing just in front of your folded arms. As promised, you down it in one. Silently, the barman refills the glass.

"Good day?  
"_Dostatŭchno dobŭr,_" he says his face impassive and blank. He wipes the counter with a cloth. "Good enough."

You finish your second and third rounds before you answer.  
"I'm leaving town tonight."  
He nods. He knows. You say the same thing every year, every year on the exact same day, the bloody slash of an anniversary. The day you never remember the next morning. You both know enough of the two languages to strike up the same conversation, it hasn't changed in fourteen years and you're not about to change it now.  
"It has to be tonight," you say. "At midnight- when nobody will know or find out. I'm going to Australia, Queens. I booked a flat. I swear, it's for real this time."  
"You gonna go down after? Visit 'im for real?"  
"No."

You never do. You saw him on the day he died and the day he was buried. Never have since. Not for real, anyways. As far as you're concerned, drunken hallucinations don't count.  
He doesn't respond. The barman brings a stack of dirty plates from the back of the bar, Levitating them with an unsteady wand hand. One slips halfway to the overflowing sink and sprays him with oily water. His apron gets smudged with chicken grease and wayward drops of flat mead.  
This is the reason you don't go to the Leaky Cauldron, or even the Three Broomsticks to be closer to Harry. People won't recognize you here like they would back home.

The band in the back shivers their way through the blues, the bass and piano dancing back to the other in a midnight duet. They wear black. They don't look up- the scotch glass on the piano lid is empty. You raise your glass to him, successfully downing another to a fellow lost soul.

For the second time, that heavy wooden door swings open, and in your bleary-eyed haze, you see a smile and a pair of rectangular glasses stand there. The other patrons ignore him, but something lights up in your face. He walks the length of the bar and pulls up the stool beside you. Like you, he salutes the band with a smile.  
And you can't believe it. Don't understand how no one else can see the living and breathing embodiment of a best-friend back from the dead standing in front of you. It's like he never left.  
"Wotcher," he says, pulling off his travelling cloak. He and the coat are completely dry, but you're already too drunk to care about the details. It's him. The little things don't matter.  
He orders a Butterbeer, hot and steaming with a dollop of foam- forever a child, forever twenty-one and invincible. From your pocket, he picks his own cigarette from the pack, tucking a second behind his ear. He drinks deeply, and you follow suit, foam carving lips out of your dumbfounded expression.

"Been waiting long?"  
"Not nearly long enough." You say. "You're late."

He smirks, his black hair flipping around his forehead. The hair that refused to lie straight. The hair you teased him about for years. He's wearing the same outfit he wore on the day he died, the same shirt you cried over for hours fourteen years ago. The same flickering facade you see in nightmares and dreams. The best-friend that's constantly fading in and out of your consciousness.

You order drink after drink; cocktails, mead, tankards of Rakia. Muggle tequila by the shot. Your best-friend does the same. And with every one, his physicality grows clearer, his words louder. Like every other year, you're desperate enough to want to believe that he's really there; actually sitting beside you with a drink in his hand and a word of sympathy for his long-since lost best-friend.  
The bar steadily empties as the moon sinks into dawn, night turns into day. Soon, even those loose women leave. Soon, you're the only ones left.  
He smacks his lips. You light another cigarette. He orders another round and raises his glass- it's some of that absinthe, the strongest stuff there is, the stuff you can never find at home. Now he wants to get drunk, wants to be numb because he knows that he'll never be able to again.  
"To Marauding," he says. He smirks. The obnoxious bastard.  
"Long live the reckless and the brave." You say, completing the motto you invented together when you were fourteen. You smile for the first time in three months. Smile with your best-friend that you haven't seen in a year.  
The barman slides your umpteenth drink towards you, and you watch as it defies gravity for a moment before it lands flat on the rough hewn slab of wood. You raise your glass with your best-friend.

"I've missed you, Jamie."  
He nods, puts a hand on your shoulder. Grimaces, not for him- but for you. Always for you. But it doesn't touch, doesn't make it that far. It feels like a river running down your arm, not like a normal hand. It's not comforting like a humans hand should be.

"It hasn't been the same since, not like you said it would," You say, loudly and maybe even a hysterically because your best-mate is back from the dead and you only see him when you're drunk, only see him on Hallows Eve. And it scares you because you're going mad, seeing things. But you're not- he's right there, right in front of you smoking a cigarette just like he used to. And year after year you do the same thing, go to the same pub in Bulgaria, get drunk out of your wits and see him again. It's unhealthy and wrong but you don't care- you're so beyond caring. He's wearing the same Muggle shirt Lily hated, the same blue-jeans and rectangular glasses with a chip above the right eye. He's James. He's here. But you blink and think through the facts and then he's gone again.  
"You told me it would get better and it hasn't. It's only gotten worse. I can't even see a black-haired baby without having to turn around because he reminds me too much of the godson I had when you were alive. You were my whole life and then you left me. You left me, James. I'm lost without you."

The barman puts a hand over James and puts a piece of parchment in front of you. The bill. You know he can't see him. You know he's not really there.  
You look down. James' figure flickers in the candlelight.  
"I'll never be gone. Look at me," he says, looking you in the eye. "Please, try; it's like I never left."  
You look into his face, see the same scars and burns- the same jagged scar on his eyebrow that you gave him when you were seventeen. The one you saw ripped to pieces (but carefully hidden behind his stupid hair) on his funeral day.  
"Are you alone?" he asks.  
You don't have to answer. You're as drunk as a sailor and the only one left at the bar.  
"Let's get you home," he says.  
"I don't have a home." You slur, slamming the empty glass on the bar counter. "James, stop. I don't have a home."  
He puts your jacket on your shoulder and settles the tab with a pile of silver- steadies you with his arm around your shoulders. He cares enough to stay behind for you.  
"You will tonight." He smiles. "Come on, Lily''ll fix up a bed on the couch. Maybe we can play with Harry before she tucks him in for the night."  
He leads you out the door, and you wave the barman goodbye. Until next year, it says. I'll see you next year today for the rest of my life. It will never truly be goodbye.  
James leads you into the rain, looking you in the eyes. He looks so real but you know it's a lie.  
So you walk out the door alone, watching the street fade to nothing as your long since dead best-friend evaporates with the rain and falls away to the wind.


End file.
